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LONDON—Patrick Roy famously talked to his goalposts, urging them to behave, be kind.

Alexandre Despatie isn’t quite that peculiar in his relationship with the springboard.

“We have a very tight relationship but we don’t talk much.”

They have, however, kissed and made up.

A mere six weeks ago, the board was evil, damn near killed him. After Wednesday’s synchronized diving competition, all is forgiven.

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Despatie and partner Reuben Ross finished sixth. Yet, in an event where the duo was never expected to reach the podium, that was good enough to ease Despatie’s anxiety.

He admitted what he’d denied only a couple of days earlier: That he was a bit scared, most especially of the inward 3 ½ somersault — the dive in which he’d struck his head so gruesomely, the first time in a long career that he’d ever made such horrific contact with the board.

“I’m not going to lie,” he said. “I had a thought about what happened, a quick thought, just before, walking to the end of the board. I put that aside right away. The only thing I had to focus on for that dive was, go for it — you can’t hold back. And I didn’t. I got it out of the way this first time and I know everything is fine. I know it for a fact.”

He put the accident out of his head — a noggin, by the way, in which the 27-year-old still feels absolutely no sensation up top, nerve-damaged dead from the hairline back, practically scalped. The vivid scar from temple to temple will last a lifetime unless Despatie has plastic surgery. He refers to that collision as the time “I redecorated my head.”

“The feeling might come back and it might not.”

He and Ross practised that culprit dive only 20 times in the two weeks leading up to the Games, Despatie sidelined while he recovered from both emergency surgery and a Level 1 concussion. It was, in fact, their best dive of the six in the final and the last of the afternoon. But not so good that it could lift the team up from sixth spot, on a day when mistakes by others had left plenty of room to sneak up the standings.

The Canadians couldn’t take advantage of those openings, as they were also guilty of error in a sport where a smidge can make all the difference. And they were deprived of their most difficult trick dive, hence highest scoring potential, a reverse 3 ½ somersault, adjudged best left on the shelf due to a lack of training time.

While Despatie had waited for doctors to give him the practice green light, Ross was left partner-less, training alone. That quite defeats the point and challenge of diving in unison. “It’s all about feeling your partner, getting a rhythm, and that just comes with repetition,” said Ross.

The accident’s effect on his partner’s Games weighed heavily on Despatie’s mind. And it wasn’t just what happened on June 12; Despatie also missed nine months of training and Grand Prix events before that, coping with a wonky knee and tendinitis.

“We’ve had such a difficult journey. Rueben’s been incredibly patient with me.”

Despatie will get his better medal shot here but Ross, who isn’t competing in the individual event, won’t. It is probable there won’t be another Olympics in his future either. He pondered that before the competition.

“These could be my last six dives. I may never get this experience again.”

Thirty-nine relatives in the stands saw this experience.

“It’s really such a rush.”

For Despatie, a nice acquittal of the accident dive gave him a mental boost heading into the individual event.

“I just felt more in control than I have been. So that’s a big step for me, a big step forward for what’s coming in the next few days. This morning, I didn’t know what to expect, how it was going to be. I’m really happy with how I felt, with how I sort of gained control over myself, my thoughts.”

The horror of his near catastrophe, however, is something he won’t ever forget.

“I’ll be reminded every single day — unless I stop looking at myself in the mirror.”

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